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The strange case of KSP burn out


Rosco P. Coltrane

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Personally, I never really had a burnout, but I did get a bit impatient on career mode. 

Currently, I am playing a heavily modded career (along with GPP, and the Give-Airplanes-A-Purpose mods). Most of the Airplane contracts don't seem to work or trigger, especially the reach xxxxx-meters in altitude ones. There is where I just give up and use cheat to complete the contract for the cash so I can focus more on space-related stuff. Thing is, I was recording my HARD career to take on the challenge, but it seems to take forever until I get enough funds especially with the lower rewards income. 

Anyways yeah - Not a burnout, but the urge to just cheat a bit so I can do more space stuff does feel like a "burnout". If I don't speed things up, I tend to leave the career alone until some patch comes - or in this case, the addon/DLC. 

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On 29/4/2017 at 10:10 AM, Spraki said:

 

Anyways yeah - Not a burnout, but the urge to just cheat a bit so I can do more space stuff does feel like a "burnout". If I don't speed things up, I tend to leave the career alone until some patch comes - or in this case, the addon/DLC. 

 

the same, i allways  tendt to start a new save game with the "promise " this time i dont use any cheat to speed up the things and get biger and better pieces...and .... 3 minutes latter i using the cheat for having all the buildings in the max lvl 

 

and @KerikBalm finally discovery what i making worng: use a deocuper insted off a docking port to cargo the satcom!/and turn off the fuel tanks of the rocket until the deploy for dont spend the fuel ! 

Edited by jackstech
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13 hours ago, jackstech said:

the same, i allways  tendt to start a new save game with the "promise " this time i dont use any cheat to speed up the things and get biger and better pieces...and .... 3 minutes latter i using the cheat for having all the buildings in the max lvl 

 

 

Obviously, it is up to us as players to do "do whatever we want to do", but at the same time we'd like to play without feeling guilty. I think the game needs to address career mode, although we're sorta getting that with the DLC/Addon somewhat. I guess.

I was going to upload my video-adventures of this hard-mode career but there were simply moments where I just didn't want to spend another three weeks of farming the same plane-related contracts (and some of which that are not even "complete-able" due to slight issues with other mods). Anyways. It is probably better to skip the boring parts. 

And if anything, if we do use cheats, at least we will say it. I heard there was a lot of drama about some Hazard-ish dude who made a cool SSTO but apparently had gravity hacked so it could do stuff. Dunno about the details. 

 

To get back on the topic though, I still think that you might want to install at least one of the planet mods. Those have really changed my KSP experience; even though I must admit that with roughly 2k hours, I still hadn't gone to stock outer planets. And that was just due to having updates kill my savegames. Anyways, I'm intending to buy the nonsteam/nonDRM versions so I can enjoy playing where and whenever I want.

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I haven't been around he forums in a while as I've been going through it too - just not very inspired to play KSP at the moment. Though from time to time I'll still do a moon landing or just spend time liquiding around in some jets for a while :wink:

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I haven't been playing it for a few months now.

I got tired of crashes, low performance (meet the laptop) and glitches. And I've been getting more enjoyment out of GMod/fps games so far.

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Fed up with stock Kerbin being so darn small and lifeless. Kerbin-Side mod is a step in the right direction, but it should be stock and 100 times more of it. Still, with Kerbin-side and SVE plus 80 other mods installed to the brink of my PC collapsing, the homeworld is dead except for some generic and repetitive survey missions. 
As for stock Kerbin being so small, 10x mods look disgustingly horrible from low altitude and surface.

-I guess what I want for KSP is optional multiplayer with state of the arts graphics like i.e star citizen, or at least half way there, and 10x being a stock, polished option for experienced players. I need to feel like I want to stay on the surface of any planet longer than the usual grab of science and flag planting. (Hey @SQUAD, please use some of your sales income to hire some graphics designers with 2017 skills)

I am at the point where immersion is lost from the lack of something beautiful, dynamic and alive. That is my burn-out.

Edited by SkyKaptn
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i manage the ksp burnout by pausing for a couple of days/weeks :)

does anyone recognize the thing that you do stuff in ksp while doing other stuff outside the game as well? for example, i watch a series while launching and manoeuvring with mechjeb.

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I have definitely experienced "KSP burnout" to the extent that I got physically exhausted. I've had to take month long breaks each time this has happened. I tend to end up "farming" in games that I really like, and at that point it turns into a second job instead of a pastime activity. I had to quit playing Minecraft completely as I always end up building large and complex farms instead of mining, building and exploring and having fun. Same thing tends to happen in KSP, during my last "run" in KSP I put a "science farm" in orbit around the mun to produce tons of science points. I played with the KSP Interstellar mod and the top technologies there require a lot of science points.

I don't "burn out" because I get sick of the game, I "burn out" because I become obsessed with it. KSP is one of those games that has my "x-factor", I am a tinkerer, and I love to tinker with new rocket designs. When I come to the point that I spend more time designing the docking bay of my new space cruiser than it takes to do the trip it's built for, that's when it's time for me to take a break.

Hm, this turned into quite the rant, oh well, good to know that I'm not the only burnt out Kerbalnout.

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2 hours ago, Mjarf said:

When I come to the point that I spend more time designing the docking bay of my new space cruiser than it takes to do the trip it's built for, that's when it's time for me to take a break.

That's normal life in KSP for me... 4 hours designing, 25 minutes maneuvering, a few minutes actually using my design. :P

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  • 1 month later...

My first 1000 hours of KSP were rather steady.

Lately (and this takes me well past 2000 hrs) I find its a bit more chronic - I play intensely for a few days or a week and then totally ignore KSP for several weeks.

I think this is due to settling into a primarily "design focus" play style vs a "mission execution" play style.

I feel this is due to there being so little to actually "do" once a mission arrives at the destination...  This also has driven me to play sandbox exclusively.

That said, my "design focus" play has been dramatically enhanced since I transitioned to RO/RSS.

1 hour ago, FasterThanFlourite said:

If you are experiencing KSP burnout, you simply need to fly at a lower altitude :sticktongue:.

This is a very limiting strategy :wink:

 

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I'm in this spot too, where despite over 500 hours in the game I have yet to go past minus. I think I get too side tracked or stuck on having a big presence in the Kerbin SOI I forget about all the rest. I go through play spurts generally when a patch comes out. 

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I've been burned out for more than a year. Career mode progression is just bad. There have been plenty of suggestions and Squad hasn't really implemented any of them. I'm probably going to return in a few weeks once my Rome II Total War campaign is finished, though. Maybe a year off is just what I needed.

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On 4/18/2017 at 1:52 AM, Rosco P. Coltrane said:

KSP is a strange game, unique in many ways for sure. And one of those is, to me, the unique way in which it annoys me... Let me explain.

In other games I'm either having fun, or I'm not. It's instantaneous, I'm playing and I think "Bah! Time to stop playing this sh... erm, game."

Careful!

 

Also, I agree with the premise, although its not exactly how you explained it. I'll play it almost exclusively for a few weeks or so, then not play it for months. Rinse and repeat

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I get this too - typically I take a few months off to play Train Simulator, Flight Simuator, or GTA V, or Minecraft, or one of 20 or so games I have on Steam - all the others are short-lived, except Train Simulator and GTA V.

Usually I come back when a new version is released, or between versions I'll come back after a few months to see what's updated in the mods I typically use.  I'm not like most of the list - I've never played a career game for more than a couple of days, I've never visited anything in the stock system past Dres, never visited any of OPM even though it's been installed for a year - but I did fly an Orion ship out to Cercani, which is WAY beyond anything in either Stock *or* OPM.  That took 11.5 kerbal years, and basically all my Kerbin orbital missions de-orbited during that time that I spent several dozen hours at or near max time warp. Like @SkyKaptn , I also use Kerbin-Side and am frustrated by the lack of any real habitation on Kerbin.  And like others, I'm frustrated at how quickly performance degrades, especially since the 1.0 release. But I keep coming back, because KSP is still more fun than Orbiter, and easier to mod, and has a lot more interesting (and recent) mods than Orbiter.

I took about a 2 month respite, and came back a couple weeks ago, and dived into @Angel-125's Heisenberg mod.  Awesome mod, and I've been building flying aircraft carriers and trying to land tiny fighter planes on them for more than a week. My current game install of 1.3 used to have MKS and most of the USI mods installed, but I've been having so much fun with Heisenberg that I decided to give Pathfinder a try. And that's my big piece of advice for those suffering KSP burnout but who want to try something else because they love KSP and aren't ready to let go of the game - try the challenges if you haven't, try the major game-changing mod packages which really change game mechanics or add major functionality: The USI Constellation (MKS and lots of others), WildBlue (Pathfinder/DSEV/Hesienberg), and Kerbalism.  Add some extra solar systems with Kopernicus and build a ship with a life support mod (like USI-LS or Snacks or TAC-LS) which can make a multi-year journey via Orion or some other massively overpowered engine that isn't a warp drive.  KSP is what you make it, but we all get burned out figuring out things we want to do - maybe that's the curse of the open-world / sandbox / simulator games, because you have to think it all up yourself, and who has time and energy for that?  My way of dealing with that has been to get on the forums frequently to see what other people are doing and to try my own had at some of those things - or use them to spur ideas of my own.

Anyway, hope some of that is helpful for somebody.

 

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Thinking I must have misread the OP after reading the comments, I went back and read it again.

I suppose, in a sense, the game is a bit like chess for me. When playing chess I tend to have a knotted brow and I am not sure what I am experiencing can be exactly described as 'fun'. But I am I am totally absorbed in the pieces on those 64 squares to the point that everything else in the room verges on nonexistent.

Perhaps this is a bit overstated, but KSP can be that way too. You are confronted with knotty problems that do not always have ready solutions. And your solution can have consequences further down the road. I have found myself building advance rovers and taken radially mounted pieces off to re-position them, only to find I can't reattach it in the right configuration, and it will liquid me off. Liquid me off, in fact, to the point that I will sometimes voice oaths that will also never appear in this forum about my goodly designed piece of ship. But the problem has not been solved - and I resume the struggle (I think that last part is from Waiting For Godot).

When you win at chess, you are ecstatic; When you lose at chess you brood and say 'set the piece up again.' Fortunately, I win more often than I lose in KSP. :)

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 4/18/2017 at 3:52 PM, Rosco P. Coltrane said:

But KSP is different. Often times I'm playing until I realize I'm tired and liquided off (or rather, I've been tired and liquided off for the past two hours!), at which point I say to my self "why the heck are you still playing?! Go do something else!"... and then I set to complete one more contract, send that one probe, land something or check that one rover I left on a cliff... and the cycle resets itself... until an hour later when it comes back to me "wait, wasn't I fed up?" and I finally close the game for the day.

It's like the games hooks you in to the point where you lose the ability to gauge your own enjoyment of the thing. It's the weirdest thing because you'd think that in order to hook you in, the game would make you happier, not angrier. :D

Does this happen to you as well? If not with KSP, any other game?

Yes, as well as KSP, I get this way at times with The Long Dark, and with Subnautica. Not having fun anymore, but still compulsively playing.

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